Inspiring dialogue on design.

Architectural Flash Cards

Last spring, Michie Cao’s 13-dayKickstarter campaigngot off to a slow start. "During the first half I couldn't even raise $1,000," she says. "And I was very nervous."

A former UCLA architecture student, Cao currently attends graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York. And she has combined what she’s learned at both schools to make architecture easier to understand for the rest of us—with posters and a smaller set of prints dubbed “Archigrams.” “Like Pokémon cards for architecture geeks,” in the words of Cao, each depicts a well-known building—the Eames House, Mies’s Farnsworth House, Wright’s Fallingwater, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, and more—and comes with an explanatory notecard written in plain English rather than professional jargon.

“They’re all the buildings I studied in architecture school at UCLA,” Cao says. “I realized how architecture as a field can sometimes be inaccessible. Even though there’s a lot of interest in its history, the information can be dense, or maybe it just isn’t presented in a fun and easily digestible way.”

But now that she is studying interaction design and how to bridge the digital and physical worlds, she has applied that knowledge to making architecture more easily comprehendible. “It’s like with flash cards,” she says. “They’re small, bite-sized pieces of information.” Printed on 130-pound Strathmore cover stock, the cards are 5” x 7” and come 10 to the pack. The posters will be printed on an offset press at 18” x 24”.

To raise $3,000 for printing and packaging costs, Cao launched her Kickstarter campaign. A week into it, things looked less than promising—but when word got out, hundreds of backers liked it enough to commit more than $11,000, almost four times her goal. “Even now I’m shocked,” she says. “I can’t fathom the idea.”

In the meantime, Cao has bumped up the press run of the posters from 100 to 150. And if the response to her campaign is any indication, chances are that we’ll see a second run—and hopefully a lot more.

J. Michael Welton writes about architecture, art, and design for national and international publications. He also edits and publishes a digital design magazine atarchitectsandartisans.com, where portions of this column first appeared.

The Intelligencer

Sign up for The Intelligencer, a bi-weekly dose of design inspiration, interviews, contests and more, sent directly to your inbox.

Email Address

About Design Bureau Magazine

Design Bureau delivers honest and inspirational global dialogue on design from diverse disciplines and points of view. It gathers people like you—creative professionals, style arbiters and industry leaders—and connects you with a like-minded community of design enthusiasts across the world with one common idea: discovering great design and the people who make it happen. Published in Chicago by ALARM Press.

TIPS

Each issue of DB is packed with stories on architecture, interior design, photography, technology, graphic design and fashion, and delivers it through engaging interviews, features and lifestyle coverage in a variety of hip departments. We celebrate the exciting unpredictability of multidimensionality.